Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Taylor Swift performs at Amazon Music’s Prime Day concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom, July 10, 2019, in New York.
Last month, following the release of Taylor Swift’s tenth studio album, Midnights, she announced a 52-date North American stadium tour. Fans hadn’t seen Swift on tour since 2018 (a 2020 tour was canceled due to COVID-19). In that stretch, Swift has released four albums and rereleased much of her discography. Ticketmaster, the exclusive ticketing agent for the tour, set up a presale system to give special access to fans and prevent bots from grabbing all the seats.
But when the presale began on Tuesday, fans were kicked out of the queue or waited for hours in long lines. The crush of ticket buyers even affected non-Swift events.
The problem was widespread enough that Ticketmaster released a statement, blaming the glitches on unprecedented demand. But this incident isn’t that different, as anybody who has tried buying presale tickets from Ticketmaster before can tell you. Speaking from personal experience, it’s a disaster. The only difference this time around is the company ticked off the loyal fan base of one of the biggest artists on the planet.
It’s not clear whether that will matter to Ticketmaster and its corporate parent Live Nation Entertainment, which have a stranglehold over the music and live event business. If anyone can disrupt this monopoly, however, it’s the Swifties.
By the end of Tuesday, progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and David Cicilline (D-RI) were calling for action against Ticketmaster. Last year, Cicilline and Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) called on the Department of Justice to investigate Live Nation, citing its 80 percent share of the venue ticketing space and its entry into the resale market. According to their letter, Ticketmaster’s walled garden, shrouded as “SafeTix,” prevents consumers from selling their tickets off the platform, thereby allowing the company to control sales and reap additional fees from ticket transfers.
In a letter to Live Nation President and CEO Michael Rapino, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) highlighted the lack of incentives for monopolies to provide good customer service. She said: “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in dramatic service failures, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”
By yesterday afternoon, Ticketmaster announced that ticket sales for the general public would be canceled, inadvertently admitting that the company fumbled their marketing strategy from the start.
This is not the first time that Swift has crossed swords with Ticketmaster or other music monopolies. As other artists have had to succumb to the pressure from streaming giants, Swift has long fought against them, though in the end she has put her music back on those platforms.
In 2018, Taylor Swift teamed up with Ticketmaster for an exclusive program geared toward preventing scalpers from buying up presale tickets by offering codes to the most loyal fans (i.e., customers who could verify an album purchase). Critics said the move could easily be gamed through multiple album purchases. Still, some fans on Twitter said the old program proved more reliable, even with its flaws.
Musicians have long raised concerns over the impact of a single company dominating the live music space.
Even before this week, Swifties were demanding that the Justice Department break up Ticketmaster, after the website to sign up for the presale crashed. It was even part of President Biden’s pre-election announcement that his administration would take on “junk fees” attached to consumer products. A 2018 GAO report found that Ticketmaster fees add about 27 percent to the face value of a ticket on average, and represent half of Live Nation’s total revenue.
THE GENERAL HORRIBLENESS OF TICKETMASTER has been gospel for concertgoers practically forever, but the company has only grown in power over the decades.
In 2010, Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged to form Live Nation Entertainment. Before the merger, Live Nation was a promoter and talent manager and a venue owner, while Ticketmaster sold tickets, though both were overlapping onto the other’s turf. In practice, rolling the two into one eliminated every competitor in both markets. To this day, on the company’s page, they describe the move as providing “more options than ever to enjoy live events, and things are only getting better.”
Under President Obama, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division approved the merger under guidelines that required Ticketmaster to license its ticketing software to competitors. But because of the vertical integration from combining promoters/talent managers, venues, and ticket brokers, those guidelines amounted to a patchwork set of reforms that could be steamrolled by the company’s outsized influence from its promotion and talent-managing divisions.
Throughout these merger negotiations, then–White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ari Emanuel, served on Live Nation’s board of directors.
Ten years later, the Antitrust Division admitted to its previous errors and fined the company $10 million—a fraction of its pandemic-induced-low 2020 profit of $1.9 billion—for choking off a competitor by tampering with customer data. Even throughout the pandemic, when virtually no live events occurred, the company’s stock continued to rise, though it’s fallen off with the market downturn more recently.
Last month, More Perfect Union, the American Economic Liberties Project, the Sports Fans Coalition, and other groups put together an email template to send complaints to the Department of Justice to prompt an investigation into Ticketmaster. The letter details how additional fees can total up to as much as 75 percent of the original ticket price and how consumers have expressed similar concerns to other regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As of press time, over 21,000 letters had been sent to the Justice Department.
The consequences of extreme consolidation go beyond consumers. The advocacy letter details how musicians have long raised concerns over the impact of a single company dominating the live music space. A cross section of interests prevents artists from dealing directly with venues to arrange a tour. Instead, Ticketmaster functions as an intermediary, effectively controlling what cities an artist tours in and the revenue stream for a venue. The Justice Department noted in 2020 that “[venues] refusing to contract with Ticketmaster will result in the venue receiving fewer Live Nation concerts or none at all.”
So if Taylor Swift wanted to tour independently from Ticketmaster, she’d be barred from most every major stadium and every major festival, which Live Nation and its only competitor, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), control. As one of the biggest artists on the planet, Swift could hypothetically embark on an independent tour where her team either booked her at independent tiny venues or built venues from the ground up, cutting Ticketmaster from the equation. This is what Pearl Jam did in the 1990s. But that’s not sustainable, especially for artists with much less star power.
In the end, there’s only so much the number one artist in the world can do against corporate power. Yet funnily enough, Swift’s Twitter bio currently reads, “I’m the problem, it’s me,” a lyric from her newest album. From Ticketmaster’s perspective, that could be true. An angry army of Swifties who’ve taken the anti-monopoly pill could tip the scales. But they would have to be paired with an aggressive Antitrust Department, lawmakers, and other frustrated consumers who’ve experienced the deleterious influences of corporate power.
